Crusades Series
(1996)

Sacred Figures. Human Bodies. Ancient Questions.

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In 1996, Claude MarQuis turned his gaze to the New Testament — not as a believer, but as a painter grappling with the oldest questions of faith, myth, and the stories we inherit.

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The Crusades Series (1996) comprises roughly twenty works, exhibited simultaneously at two Ottawa venues — Market Station and Aux 4 Jeudis in Hull — due to the collection’s scale. The canvases range from 30 × 40 inches to 32 × 48 inches, monumental in presence and quietly confrontational in content. Friends and acquaintances posed as New Testament characters: Jesus, John the Baptist, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Joseph, and God. These are not devotional images; they are interrogations.

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MarQuis drew on Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, which proposes that Jesus is a composite figure shaped from earlier Middle Eastern saviour myths. That scepticism informs the work. In The Immaculate Conception, God and Mary are depicted naked together in bed — a literal reading that questions the mythology on its own terms. 

The series is painted almost entirely in blue — deep cobalt, cool silver, midnight violet. Halos appear, but they are eroded, uncertain. The figures are human and vulnerable: Jesus after the Crucifixion, Mary Magdalene being stoned, John the Baptist  his Executioner. Individual portraits of each character complete the series.

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